Bingham: Thrill of the Maris chase

Sunday

Sep 25, 2011 at 2:00 AM

I wasn't around when Abner Doubleday invented baseball, nor was I on the scene when Babe Ruth pointed to the center field bleachers and hit one there, but I most certainly was in Yankee Stadium 50 years ago – on Oct. 1, 1961 – when Roger Maris hit his 61st home run of the season to break the Babe's record.

WALTER BINGHAM

I wasn't around when Abner Doubleday invented baseball, nor was I on the scene when Babe Ruth pointed to the center field bleachers and hit one there, but I most certainly was in Yankee Stadium 50 years ago – on Oct. 1, 1961 – when Roger Maris hit his 61st home run of the season to break the Babe's record.

I was one of two Sports Illustrated baseball writers, junior to the other, Roy Terrell, who would later become the magazine's managing editor. Beginning that September, my assignment was to track Maris from ballpark to ballpark as his number of home runs rose through the 50s and write a series of updates.

Over the course of that month, I can't say I got to know him, but he did realize whom I represented and certainly why I was there. He would see me and nod, or offer a “how you doing?”

Later on, as he drew close to Ruth's record, swarms of media from around the globe descended on him, seeking so much of his time he began to lose his hair. But I had arrived on the scene several weeks earlier, which put me in the same camp as the New York newspaper corps.

Before Saturday's game with the Red Sox, the Yankees culminated a seasonlong commemoration of the Maris-Mantle home-run chase with a ceremony at Yankee Stadium.

Meanwhile, back in the day, I watched him take batting practice evening at Yankee Stadium, standing behind the cage with its protective netting.

Allow me at this point to digress with this nugget of reminiscence: A year earlier I had been watching batting practice, leaning on the chest-high aluminum bar supporting some of the netting.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and there was Casey Stengel, the legendary Yankee manager. Gently he pulled the netting so that it touched my nose, illustrating that a foul tipped ball would extend the netting beyond the aluminum bar and into my nose. He must have said something – Casey always did – but I forget what it was. Sometime in the future I may relate some of my other encounters with the man.

Onward: Maris was batting inside the cage when, after fouling one off, he banged the handle of his bat on the ground, then exchanged it for another from a player waiting to hit. Roger's bat had cracked. I picked it up and saw that there was a hairline fissure near the handle.

When Maris left the cage, I asked him if he wanted the bat.

“That the one I broke,” he asked?

When I nodded, he said, “It's yours.”

I took it into the press box during the game, then home on the Long Island railroad. I taped the handle and for years used it to play pepper with my sons. Alas, even more years later, when my wife and I moved to the Cape, it had disappeared.

On Oct. 1, 1961, Maris had 60 home runs, tying Ruth. The Yankees were playing the Red Sox in their final game at home and I, as ordered, was sitting in one of two purchased seats in right field. The other was occupied by a 17-year-old photographer named Walter Iooss, perhaps his first Sports Illustrated assignment. Walter was to become one of the two best – Neil Liefer was the other – photographers SI ever had.

Iooss had with him a camera that looked as if it might stop a tank at 40 yards. He asked if I would hold it, which was focused on home plate, and pull the trigger whenever Roger would start to swing. He had a second camera for his purposes.

Maris walked his first time up. But on the second pitch of his second at bat against Tracy Stallard, he swung. I pressed the trigger. Here came the ball, deep to right. In that instant I abandoned the camera and looked up. The ball landed somewhere to my right. Home run.

This story has, as Bogart said in “Casablanca,” no “wow” ending. I darted between rows of seats and caught up with one Sal Durante, who had caught, or at least corralled the ball. By the time I found him, he was making a phone call home. Then suddenly Yankee people were conducting him to the Yankees locker room.

Durante was given team trivia – a glove, ball, bat etc. Maybe a few tickets to a game or two. Years later it occurred to me he might have held out for many hundreds of thousands of dollars, as became true when McGwire and Bonds broke other records.

I never did see the photograph I took, the magazine opting for a closer in shot. And sometimes, in the dark of night, I wonder what ever became of that bat and what I might have gotten for it.

Walter Bingham, a former editor and writer for Sports Illustrated, lives in Truro. He can be contacted by email at sports@capecodonline.com.

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